I said slowly, “Agents of the old queen have put about rumors that Queen Caroline is a witch. Haven’t they? Among the army, and in the countryside. Queen Eleanor has fanned the flames of gossip and fear against her own daughter, in order to keep her crown.”
“How should I know?” Maggie whispered. “But the army is as close to the old queen as feathers on a chicken.”
Now I understood why Queen Caroline had so few petitioners. Such hatred and maneuvering between mother and child! My own mother in her lavender gown, so tender and caring in the few memories I had of her . . .
“Maggie, what’s on Soulvine Moor?”
But, despite all she had already said, there were places Maggie would not go. She stared at me mutely, and all at once I realized that the hand holding mine had turned icy and her teeth chattered.
“You’re freezing! I’m sorry, come back into the kitchen. I cannot thank you enough for all your help.” I led her back inside. “Just one thing more—what is a milady posset?”
Maggie stopped just before the closed door to the kitchen. She flung my hand back at me and screeched, all at once careless of listeners, “A
milady posset
? Is that what you went to Mother Chilton for? A
milady posset
?”
“I—”
“For whom? Look at me when I speak to you—
for whom
?”
“I can’t say.”
“I’ll bet you can’t! And to think I trusted you—that I even thought—a milady posset! You’re a filthy animal!”
“Maggie, don’t—”
“Don’t tell me what to do! And get out of my sight! A
milady posset
!”
She flung open the door and darted through to the kitchen, slamming it behind us. Before she could run off, I grabbed her by the shoulder. “What is it for? What?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know! Who was she, some whore brought in for you, that you stupidly believed was clean and now take pity on? Were you the only one who had her? And to think I helped you!” Maggie tore herself free of my grasp and ran out of the kitchen, leaving her bread half kneaded on the table.
And I understood.
Lady Cecilia had the crawls. She had bedded with someone, and he had given it to her. Men could carry the disease but did not fall ill of it. Women did. Untreated, the crawls could even make it impossible for women to ever bear children. Bawdy jests overheard at country faires had told me that girls greatly feared the crawls, which turned them red and itching in their . . .
Cecilia. My shining lady.
Who was he?
In the larder I changed back to my court clothing. I stole a kitchen lantern, lit it, and made my way back through the labyrinth of courtyards, scarcely seeing them. Anger and hatred burned in me. For him, who had taken her. For her, who had played me for the fool I was. All the while I adored her, worshipped her, would have given my life for one kiss from her, Cecilia had been lying with one of the courtiers, perhaps allowing herself to be won in a game like Lady Jane. . . .
No. The truth came to me so suddenly that I stopped cold beside a winter-empty planting bed, my feet as rooted to the ground as the tree whose bare branches arched above. It was not some random Lord Tom or Sir Harry. If it had been, Cecilia would have done whatever the other ladies did in such circumstances. It had been someone she could not admit to. It had been the prince.
I saw her again, running to Emma Cartwright the day I had arrived at court, hiding in her room from Prince Rupert. I had thought then that her hiding was genuine, when I didn’t yet know her. Cecilia lived for admiration, for being petted, for love. She had been teasing him, as she teased me, as she teased every man at court. But Prince Rupert had bedded her, and the other ladies knew. (
“Cecilia, there are other things in life besides dancing.” “I think she knows that!”
and
“Green wood burns hotter than yellow”
—the prince had favored green to please his sister.) Emma Cartwright had left court shortly after I arrived—dismissed because she knew too much? Did the good Mistress Cartwright know that Prince Rupert carried the crawls, and that he had undoubtedly carried them to his new bride? That knowledge might have canceled his wedding to Princess Isabelle, might have endangered The Queendom’s political alliance with the bride’s rich realm. No wonder Cecilia had been nearly hysterical. The crawls from a prince, with a royal marriage hanging in the balance and the danger of wrath from two queens.
It was that moment, in the dark of a cold spring night, that for the first time I understood what life at court truly was. I had been a fool; I was a fool still. But now I knew. Nothing was as it seemed. Everything was for sale, and everything was judged by how it affected the web of power.
My new knowledge turned me careful. I extinguished my lantern. In the dark I fumbled toward a flower bed, took Mother Chilton’s little cloth bag from my pocket, and buried it. It was an easy matter to rearrange ornamental green stones to disguise the freshly turned earth.
After a long time standing there, thinking, while my toes grew stiff and the hairs in my nose froze, I moved on. I passed the guards with a jest and made my way through the deserted presence chamber to my alcove. I drew back the curtain.
And there, waiting for me in the darkness, stood the queen.
“Where have you been, Roger?” she said.
15
“WHERE HAVE YOU
been, Roger?” the queen repeated when I did not—could not—speak.
With the kitchen lantern at the end of my suddenly slack and terrified arm, I could scarcely see her face, only the gleam of light on the green satin of her gown. “I . . . I went to the kitchen . . . I was hungry!”
“So you told the guards. And what else? No, wait, not here. Follow me.”
I stumbled after her, wondering if I was to be led to some dungeon, to some instruments of torture that would . . . But the queen led me through the outer chamber to her privy chamber, the room where I’d had my first audience with her. The door to her bedchamber was closed, as ever. In the privy chamber Lord Robert sat beside a bright fire, with a goblet of wine before him on the ornately carved table.
The queen closed the door and leaned back against it. Her face was kindly, her eyes warm. She smiled at me. “Now, Roger, tell me where you have been and whom you have spoken to. And leave no detail out.”
How much did she know? I had to protect Maggie, protect Cecilia. . . . Why protect Cecilia? Because I loved her still. And I could no more deliver her to the hands of the queen than I could a butterfly to the pin that would fix it, squirming, on a board.
“I was hungry,” I said. “I went to the kitchen to get something to eat. I have a friend there, a kitchen maid, and . . . and we lay together. In the courtyard where the barges bring vegetables to the palace.”
The queen stood so that she could see both me and Lord Robert. From the corner of my eye, I saw him give a tiny nod. So he already knew where I’d been, and with whom. Her web of spies—or his—must extend itself even farther than I had guessed. If one of those spies had overheard Maggie and me—
The queen studied me, still with that kindly smile on her beautiful, ruthless face. Finally she said, “I believe you. You have grown taller and fuller since you entered my service, Roger, and I can believe you would lie with a maid. Nonetheless, after I retire, Lord Robert will search you to make sure you carry no messages to anyone. And you will not leave my rooms again without permission, do you understand?”
“Yes, Your Grace.” Relief flooded me, so strong that for a shameful moment I thought I might cry.
All at once the queen came toward me, took both my hands in hers. She stared deeply into my eyes, her voice low and soft. “In the coming days I will need you, Roger. No one else can do for me what you can, and your gift makes you a treasure beyond price. The Queendom is in grave danger. I am determined to protect it, and to someday hand the realm intact to my daughter. I will do whatever I must to protect my realm. Do you believe that?”
And I did. Her dark eyes so earnestly searching mine . . . The queen was beautiful, but I knew I was not responding to her beauty. Cecilia filled all that part of my mind. The queen was a skilled actress, but I didn’t think she was play-acting about this. She was genuinely concerned about the future of The Queendom she was not being allowed to rule, and she would do whatever was necessary to protect it. She would flay me alive if that would help. She would even do the same to Lord Robert, if she had to. . . . Did he know that?
In one night, my mind had traveled over too far a distance. I was bewildered, frightened, weary. The world was not as I had thought it.
“Yes, Your Grace,” I said. “I believe you care for The Queendom.”
She dropped my hands. “Good. Robin, give him some wine, search him, and send him to bed. This is a tired lad.”
Lord Robert rose. The queen walked toward her bedchamber, but in the doorway she turned and looked back over her shoulder at me. “Your kitchen maid—was this your first time?”
“Yes,” I said, and she smiled at me roguishly and shut the door.
Lord Robert’s search was swift, not gentle, and very thorough. Somewhere during its course, I realized that he—a lord of The Queendom, the queen’s advisor and lover—was afraid of me, because of what the queen had called “my gift.” She was not afraid, but he was.
No, the world was not as I had thought it.
Lord Robert found nothing in my clothing, on my person. “Go to bed,” he said roughly, “and don’t ever do this again.”
The next afternoon Cecilia came with the queen’s other ladies to the outer chamber. Queen Caroline had spent the morning closeted in her inner chamber with Lord Robert and a series of couriers, all of whom looked as if they had ridden hard to arrive at the palace. Some of their clothing looked strange, and no one knew where they had come from. She sent word early that her ladies need not attend her and so they had not. Nor did I, and I spent the whole long morning alone in the vast presence chamber or the deserted outer chamber, staring out the open window at the courtyard. Sometime during the night the cold had finally released its grasp, and it was spring. But the soft air and sweet scents didn’t move me.
Not even hunger moved me. I didn’t dare go to the kitchen for anything to eat—not after the queen’s warning—and nothing was brought to me, so my stomach clenched and growled. Breakfast and dinner were carried in to the queen. The smells of roasted meat and steaming soup filled my mouth with hopeless water.
I made myself a vow, during those long hours at the window. I had been uninterested in the larger life at court for too long; I would be so no longer. If I could not choose my fate, I could at least meet it with less ignorant eyes. I would observe, I would ask questions, I would learn.
Finally when the afternoon was nearly gone and the shadows were long in the courtyard, the ladies-in-waiting and their courtiers burst into the outer chamber in a great flock, chattering and tired and happy. “We rode as far as the mountains, Fool!” Cecilia called cheerfully to me. “A wonderful ride!”
“Yes, my lady,” I said. She was smiling, her skin warmed from the sun, her hair still damp from a bath. Never had I seen her look more beautiful. Hysteria shone in her green eyes like fever. My stomach rumbled.
“Now we must have music! Music and dancing!”
The others took up the cry:
Music! Dancing! Music!
Only recently had the queen given permission for dancing to occur when she was not present. The ladies and courtiers were young, alive, oblivious to whatever the queen may have been doing all day, although they would leap to her service the second she required them. Although were they really so oblivious, so heedless and carefree as they seemed? All of them—everyone at court—were such skilled actors. Except me.
Musicians were sent for. Under cover of all the bustle, Cecilia said to me, “Roger?”
I said, “It is buried under the tree in the fish-fountain courtyard, on the side of the tree facing the fountain. Organize a game of hide-and-seek or hide-the-coin, and you can easily retrieve it. Drink it all at once, eat nothing for a day, and lie”—my voice faltered—“with no one for a week.”
“Oh, I thank you so—”
“Was it Prince Rupert?”
She stiffened beside me, then rose and flounced off, her satin skirts swishing. But a moment later she was back. Lips so close to my ear that I could smell the scented soap on her damp hair, she whispered, “Don’t think less of me, I could not bear it,” and again she was gone.
My chest contracted in on itself, held, had to be forced to breathe again. Why should Lady Cecilia care what I, the queen’s fool, thought of her?
I watched her move through the slow, sedate figures of the court dance, her restless charm confined to one step forward, two back, a slight dip of the head. Wrong, wrong. The wrong dance for her, the wrong man, the wrong contrast between these courtiers’ gaiety and the ominous absence of the queen.
Just as darkness fell, the door to the privy chamber opened and the queen stepped out. Instantly dancers and musicians fell into deep curtsies. The queen gazed at them bleakly. She wore a gown of such deep green it looked almost black, and the dark color turned her skin chalky white. It made her look older, unlike the woman who had questioned me at midnight, let alone the one who had roistered with her court in the kitchens on the day she had found me there. It occurred to me now that never since had I seen her join her courtiers with that same abandon.